The invention concerns video mosaics. The invention relates in particular to the generation of a video stream representing a mosaic of videos.
In a known manner, such video mosaics are provided by a video stream which, when decoded, results in the display of a plurality of videos, each occupying a region of the viewable image.
To generate such video streams, it is known for example to retrieve audiovisual signals associated with a set of channels that are to be assembled into a mosaic, to sub-sample them, and to group them into a single channel. This video is then encoded similarly to a conventional channel.
Another approach is to generate a mosaic from video streams respectively decoded by different video decoding instances and to compose the decoded channels into a mosaic on a browser web page.
There are drawbacks to these approaches.
In the first case, the definition and allocation of the component channels of a mosaic are static and cannot be selected by a user. In addition, mosaics formed in this manner must also be broadcast as channels in their own right, which accordingly decreases the bandwidth for other video streams.
In the second case, the mosaic requires a video decoding instance for each displayed channel. Significant resources are therefore required to process such mosaics, making this type of mosaic unsuitable for devices with low computing power.